Announcements
Congrats to our amazing Soham! Pick up your copy here: http://yoyolabs.com/patel.html.
Soham Patel’s poems and essays have been included in Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, XCP (Cross Cultural Poetics), Anti-, The Cortland Review, SHAMPOO, Foursquare and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow, and and nevermind the storm is her first chapbook.
Congrats, Janine!
After the flood
– after Nazim Hikmet
I.
Said my father who dove and rode the sea
on a turtle, who speared a squid
and held it up so I could see, my name
was Freedom first. What he held
I put my ear to after waking.
For the full text, click here: http://www.lafovea.org/La_Fovea/janine_joseph.html
A finalist for the 2012 OSU/The Journal Award in Poetry and Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award, Janine Joseph’s poems are forthcoming from or have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Asian American Literary Review, Best New Poets 2011, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She also wrote a commissioned libretto, entitled “From My Mother’s Mother,” for the Houston Grand Opera’s “Song of Houston: East + West” series. Janine is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston.
Congrats, dear Brynn!
Tell me a little bit about what (or who) inspired this poem. Was this based upon an actual experience you had as the invisible "you"?
This poem arrived at one of the oddest moments. I was in a hostel in Seville and I couldn't sleep because of the pressing summer heat. I didn't want to turn on the light and disturb my roommate, so I started writing in the dark. When one is writing in the dark, there's a sense of urgency that keeps the pen moving across the page sightlessly. It's wonderful. There's also an inability to do the thing which can hinder the flow: compulsively re-read every word, tending to the lines like a tireless gardener. I wrote until a story I heard as a child spilled itself sideways across the unlit pages, the story of my Japanese American grandmother, Alma, lying about her race in order to avoid harassment during the war years (before her and my grandfather were eventually interned in Arizona). I recorded the story as it came to me then, in that airless pensione. Then, I wrote: "You never have to lie to survive," as if my tiny, sturdy, white-haired grandmother were standing above me, saying those exact words. "So what will you do with your freedom?"
Read the rest of the interview here.
Brynn Saito is the author of poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press in March 2013. Her poem, “Alma, 1942” is featured in Hyphen Issue 26. We asked her to record a reading of her poem, and then talked to her a little bit about the poem, her forthcoming book, and her thoughts on the direction of Asian American poetry.
Congrats, dear Brynn!
Congrats, dear fellows!
Check out the issue here: http://aalrmag.org/0203toc/
Asian American Literary Review, Fall 2012
Congrats, dear Eugenia!
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and Kundiman fellow who holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry manuscript was a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and her poems have appeared in North American Review, The Collagist, Lantern Reviewand PANK Magazine, among other publications. Born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, Eugenia currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
To read her poem, please visit: http://www.berfrois.com/2013/01/sustenance-eugenia-leigh/
"You’re not writing poetry if you’re not being honest (which isn’t the same as being confessional)."
Congrats, dear Henry!
Henry W. Leung was born in a village in Guangdong, China. He spent his childhood in Honolulu before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently completing his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan. Paradise Hunger – the winner of the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest – is his first chapbook. He writes a bimonthly column on Asian American poetry for the Lantern Review.
To read more of the interview, visit: http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2013/01/paradise-hunger-interview-with-henry-w-leung/
Congrats, dear Ocean!
Congrats to Tim and Sally!
What do we here in the U.S. take away from the brutal gang-rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey?
Across our world, miles away from the original site of violence in Delhi, India, a wave of protests and vigils have honored Jyoti and demanded an end to sexual violence. Leading the wave, thousands of protesters in Delhi have faced tear gas, water cannons and otherpolice force in order to say India needs stronger laws against sexual assault while fostering a society that does not condone gender violence -- so that it is no longer themost dangerous place to be born a girl child.
In the United States too, with our own sobering rate of sexual assaults faced by one in six women and one in 33 men, a number of vigils for Jyoti have marked local calls for community response to sexual violence.
At a recent vigil last Tuesday evening, where I contributed a poem, hundreds of community members gathered in Union Square, New York City to honor Jyoti and offer support to stop sexual violence around the world and here at home.
Then again, in an article speaking to the spread of U.S. vigils honoring Jyoti, commenter Douting Mind, asserts, "What a waste of time." Indeed, you can't bring a body back, erase suffering, wish away experience. Laws are slow to change. Society, sometimes even slower.
Thank you, Purvi, for writing this beautiful and necessary piece.
Read the rest of her post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah/sexual-violence_b_2528787.html
